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How good is Lemmy dealing with censorship and why does the sign-up process on lemmy.ml involve having to copy a sentence from "The Principles of Communism"? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey everyone, I'm new to Lemmy and just starting to figure this site out. I mainly moved here because of the censorship on Reddit where they didn't publish posts that included the slightest word not allowed by their filter and they removed/blocked lots of content. I wonder if it will be somewhat better here (on the official site it says "Censorship resistant - By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.").

The weird thing I saw with Lemmy was when I wanted to sign-up on the "lemmy.ml" server instance that according to the official Lemmy Servers listing page is a "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers".

So I thought I try that one when it's from Lemmy's own developers. When I wanted to sign-up it required an application that you needed to fill out with one of the requirements being having to copy a sentence from the link provided which links to some article called "The Principles of Communism" which I thought was very odd for a site to do. I've never seen a site like this promoting some ideology that directly where it's part of the sign-up process to almost pledge to some political or religious ideology.

This seemed very sketchy to me. Does anyone know something about this?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I appreciate you addressing the downvoting; I had noticed the trend and it's very easy to jump to the "I'm under a personal attack" conclusion.

While I believe 107% that each instance owner can do what they want; if this given instance is the first instance to which most people will be introduced, being the closest thing to an "official" instance, should they have a duty, or at the very least, an interest, in maximizing the inclusitivity of their community?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

if this given instance is the first instance to which most people will be introduced, being the closest thing to an “official” instance, should they have a duty, or at the very least, an interest, in maximizing the inclusitivity of their community?

I think this goes back to what teawrecks said earlier:

it’s not a for-profit business

It's a private club with a trivial admission process. It's not just that they don't care about maximizing inclusivity, growth, and total users, it's that they don't want any of that. They want like-minded people and they're happy to keep out or ban people that don't fit that mold.

It feels like you're saying they should want something else, but I don't see it as obvious why they would, and I don't think you've explained your reasoning why they would.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

You know, I never really stopped to consider the reasons for wanting unrestricted growth - after all, unrestricted growth is ultimately unsustainable. I guess I took for granted a cultural bias of my own that I really need to evaluate and see if it's something worth keeping internalized or to expunge it from myself. Guess I'm taking shrooms and doing some soul searching this weekend!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I would say it's one of the first, but not THE first. Lemmy.world is definitely the most popular instance (to a problematic degree).

But I don't think expressing one's love of Spongebob inherently "excludes" anyone from using Lemmy. I don't think the Lemmy devs have any duty to anyone but themselves. And any interest they have in user adoption is for their own reasons.

Nothing would stop someone from forking Lemmy and making an alternative with different ideologies. I assume the license would ask them to use a different name to not cause confusion, and I would hope that they don't break ActivityPub or federation compatibility with existing Lemmy instances. But at that point, what's the difference between a fork for ideological reasons....and just spinning up your own instance?